Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991 [Paperback]

I couldn't possibly read "Alone with the Horrors" straight through in one sitting. Ramsey Campbell has the gift of isolating his readers from their comfortable surroundings (I read these stories sitting next to our Christmas tree, surrounded by snoring cats), and plunging them into a freezing, lightless abyss. I wouldn't recommend more than one or two stories at a time. Those readers already depressed should not read them at all. I've become literally ill reading some of this author's stories, e.g. "The Guide," "The Chimney," and "The Companion"---not grossed out as after a Stephen King story, but sick with horror. There has not been an author of supernatural terror like this one since the heyday of M.R. James.

Although "Alone with the Horrors" is an almost complete compendium of Campbell's short fiction from 1961 - 1991, such tales as "The Guide" are excluded as they were written in a style not entirely his own ("The Guide" was written after the manner of M.R. James.) The following is a sample of the included stories:

"The Tower of Yuggoth" (1961) - My advice to editors of short story collections is, for the new reader's sake, don't arrange the stories in order by date written. Campbell's first published story is a Lovecraft pastiche, complete with the scion of a decayed New England family tottering about the sinister, moon-lit swamps, and doing unspeakable business with the Elder Gods. He is driven mad by the sight of "the ebony void of space" and the creatures that crawl about there, but he lives long enough (naturally) to gasp out twenty pages of Lovecraftian drivel. I wish the rule-of-exclusion had been applied to "The Tower of Yuggoth" instead of "The Guide."

(There are so many humans doing business with the Elder Gods these days, you'd think They'd form a franchise and open outlets at the local malls.)

"The Interloper" (1968) - Two schoolboys visit "The Catacombs" during lunch break. It turns out not to be a music club. If Ramsey Campbell really had teachers like the ones he depicts in this story (be sure to read his introduction to this collection), I can understand where he gets the inspiration for his horror fiction. Don't let your kids read this story. They'll never go back to school.

"The Companion" (1973) - So much great horror takes place at carnivals, and this story is one of the best. It scared the bejaysus out of Stephen King (see his nonfiction book on horror, "Danse Macabre") and it did the same to me.

"The Chimney" (1975) - A young boy is afraid of what might come down the chimney in his bedroom on Christmas Eve. I thought I had wrung all of the terror out of this story once the boy grew up and became a librarian, but I was wrong. "The Chimney" saves its gut-punch for the very end.

"Hearing is Believing" (1979)--Have you ever had a dream with multiple awakenings, each one more horrible than the last? In a sense, this story epitomizes the whole book. It is "The Tower of Yuggoth" distilled by twenty-eight years of practice into something much more horrible than any tentacled thing that cracked open the sky above New England.

Ramsey Campbell has produced some of the greatest short horror stories ever written. Most of them are in this volumn.
Mostly Campbell is influenced by H P Lovecraft rather than explicit gore or gratuitous violence - although there are always exceptions! So his writing style is completely different from say Stephen King, but both are masters of short horror fiction in their different ways.

The stories within are as scary as horror fiction can get. Amongst my favourites are "In the Bag", and perhaps best of all "The Companion". You know how with some novels (King on occasions is an example) after reading through hundreds of pages you get to the end and think - is that it? I.e. the ending never quite leaves you satisfied despite the brilliance of the story telling before (again King). Well you won't get this with Campbell's short stories, his end with a punch, metaphorically a knock-out one to your head...

Another splendid volumn to get if this one becomes unavailable is Dark Companions which contains many of the same stories. You'll probably only get this 2nd hand but its worth searching out.

Good Lord, it's really almost time for another Campbell survey collection, given that his professional writing career is about to turn 50! This collection takes us from Campbell's Lovecraftian derivative phase through the development of his own unique voice and use of settings (a certain amount of decaying industrial England for the latter, but not universally so). Campbell's antecedents are fairly clear (H.P. Lovecraft; the modern, urban ghost stories of Fritz Leiber; the classic tales of M.R. James; and a touch of the eternally ambiguous Robert Aickman); the disturbing, occasionally comic, pervasively hallucinatory prose style is pretty much all Campbell.

I'm not sure any horror writer since M.R. James has gotten more productive mileage out of things glimpsed but not properly seen; no one has consistently described even the most normative of objects and landscapes in a manner which suggests both psychological trauma and the invasion of a world-altering Otherness completely inimical to human beings. Something is always on the verge of breaking through -- through the walls of the world or the world of the sane mind. Here, even a dress ("The Fit") or the noise between the radio stations ("Hearing is Believing") can become a source of terror. But there's a grandeur to much of the terror, as there really should be: Lovecraft would have approved.